Looking ahead to IPO, Pinterest hires 1st chief operating officer
More than 200M people use service each month
SAN FRANCISCO – Pinterest is slowly putting together the pieces for an IPO, hiring a senior executive with a background in advertising sales that should help it go after a bigger slice of spending on social media.
Former Google and Square executive Francoise Brougher becomes Pinterest’s first chief operating officer at a time when the privately valued start-up is looking to break out of the long shadows cast by giant competitors Google and Facebook.
Billing itself as a “search engine for ideas,” the service says more than 200 million people using it each month to “pin” or save images they find on Pinterest or elsewhere on the Web and organize them on pinboards as they plan wedding and kitchen makeovers, book vacations or swap recipes.
Its size makes it something of a bit player. Instagram, owned by Facebook, has 800 million users who log in at least once a month, with 500 million logging in every day.
Like other tech “unicorns” such as ride-hailing firm Uber and homerental service Airbnb, Pinterest has put off an IPO, raising $150 million from private investors at a valuation of $12.3 billion in June. It also hasn’t been in a rush to build out its advertising business.
But signs point to this late bloomer getting more serious about generating revenue as it looks to compete for digital dollars with Instagram and Snapchat and chip away at the dominance of Facebook and Google. Last year, Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s president who ran point on advertising sales, left the company after more than five years.
“Their pace has picked up somewhat recently, but they started much later and have been more deliberate than some other platforms in rolling out their ad platform,” eMarketer analyst Yoram Wurmser says.
Pinterest, with its roots in the Midwest, can claim an advantage its bigger rivals can’t. With its focus on fashion and home remodeling — at a time when divisive politics and memes have ex- ploded on the Internet — it has won a reputation for fostering a more positive, upbeat experience than other social media services.
Janell Poulette, a food and lifestyle blogger from Louisville, says she used to hang out on Facebook to share recipes and hunt for deals. Now, she spends that time on Pinterest “to see the fun, happy content I want to see.”
In 2016, Pinterest hired its first chief financial officer, Todd Morgenfeld, from Twitter. Now it’s banking that Brougher, who will report to company co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann, can help the company pick up the pace some more.
“She is a world-class manager and a sharp strategic thinker,” Silbermann said of Brougher, a former Booz Allen Hamilton management consultant who parlayed a stint as vice president of business strategy at Charles Schwab into a gig at Google, where she led advertising sales to small businesses. At payments company Square, she ran sales and international until she resigned a year ago.
The majority of Pinterest users are women. Pinterest has made a public commitment to hire more women and underrepresented minorities.